Actions against Jews in Ukraine a reminder of past

2014-05-02 14:20:37

Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, was commemorated last week. In response to this greatest catastrophe to befall any nation in the lamentable history of man’s inhumanity to man, I often speak to our youth about the obligation to never consign the Holocaust to the realm of forgetfulness.

For many young people, the Holocaust was a carnage that ended many years ago with the victory over Nazi Germany. They are caught up in the accelerating pace of change where last year is ancient history and the distance in time separating them from World War II seems like an eternity. How can black-and-white films and photographs that record the Holocaust with primitive technology compete with the riot of color that bedazzles, if not blinds, them? They live in a culture dominated by obsolescence and disposability, applying not only to electronics but to human beings.

Given what an author called “the ever expanding empire of amnesia,” will the 6 million Jews suffer a second death – that of being forgotten?

In recent days, in eastern Ukraine, a synagogue was attacked with firebombs; in southern Ukraine, “Death to the Jews” was painted on a synagogue’s walls; the rabbi of Kiev was brutally assaulted; in Odessa, a Holocaust memorial was vandalized with swastikas; in Lviv, a Jewish businessman was beaten by officers at a police station on a street named for a Nazi collaborator; in Donetsk, anti-Semitic leaflets have been distributed threatening the Jewish community.

All this and more in the region where, in two days in 1941, almost 34,000 Jewish people were murdered at a place called Babi Yar.

The shelf life of evil is eternal, I tell the youth. Evil never surrenders. Many today strive to complete its unfinished agenda, making common cause with the Angel of Death. The poisonous tree of German Nazism may have been uprooted, but the seeds of its hatred were replanted in those who today uphold the philosophy and aims of the Nazis.

For the rest of their lives, our youth will confront an unending battle between civilization and savagery; between those who champion the power of ethics against those who worship the ethic of power; between those who seek to build a world founded on freedom and human rights, and those who destroy worlds through terror, conquest and subjugation.

In a world where Jewish people are often hate’s first victim, but never its last, our youth must stand for the dignity of humankind, I tell them. In the face of implacable hate, they must live out the message of the Torah that commands us to love. Confronting those who are in thrall to the cult of death, they must be loyal to the great teaching of Torah: “Choose life!”